ce. As the trains whirled by
strangers could see the signs in mammoth letters, "The Golden Belt
Mills" on the larger building and on the smaller, "The Barclay Economy
Door Strip Factory." Standing on the stone steps of her father's house
the child could read these signs clear across the mill-pond, and from
these signs she learned her letters. For her father had more pride in
that one mill on the Sycamore than in the scores of other mills that
he controlled. And even in after years, when he controlled mills all
over the West, and owned railroads upon which to take his flour to the
sea, and ships in which to carry his flour all over the world, the
Golden Belt Mill at Sycamore Ridge was his chief pride. The rumble of
the wheels and the hoarse voice of the dam that seemed to Jeanette
like the call of the sea, were so sweet to her father's ears that when
he wearied of the work of the National Provisions Company, with its
two floors of busy offices in the Corn Exchange Building in the great
city, he would come home to Sycamore Ridge, and go to his private
office in the mill. The child remembers what seemed like endless days,
but what in truth were only a few hours in a few days in a few years,
when Daddy Barclay carried her on his shoulders across the bridge and
sat her down barefooted and bareheaded to play upon the dam, while he
in his old clothes prodded among the great wheels near by or sat
beside her telling her where he caught this fish or that fish or a
turtle or a water moccasin when he was a little boy. At low water, she
remembers that he sometimes let her wade in the clear stream, while he
sat in his office near by watching her from the window. That was when
she was only four years old, and she always had the strangest memory
of a playfellow on the dam, a big girl, who fluttered in and out of
the shadows on the stones. Jeanette talked with her, but no one else
could see her, and once the big girl, who could not talk herself,
stamped her feet and beckoned Jeanette to come away from a rock on
which she was playing, and her father, looking out of a window, turned
white when he saw a snake coiled beside the rock. But Jeanette saw the
snake and was frightened, and told her father that Ellen saw it too,
and she could not make him understand who Ellen was. So he only
trembled and hugged his little girl to him tightly, and mother would
not let the child play on the dam again all that summer.

She made songs to fit the rhyth